2019 Guests of Honor

Annalee Newitz

PC: Sarah Deragon

I WRITE ABOUT SCIENCE, CULTURE, AND THE FUTURE.

Mostly I write books of the nonfiction and fiction varieties.

My first novel, Autonomous, come out from Tor in September 2017. It won the Lambda Literary Award, and was nominated for a Nebula and a Locus Award. I’m also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (Doubleday and Anchor), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. I am currently working on another novel for Tor, as well as a nonfiction book for W.W. Norton about ancient abandoned cities.

I’m currently an editor-at-large for Ars Technica, and a freelance science journalist for magazines and newspapers. I’m also the co-host, with Charlie Jane Anders, of the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, I founded io9, and was the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

My nonfiction has appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, 2600, New Scientist, Technology Review, Popular Science, Discover and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. I’m the co-editor of the essay collection She’s Such A Geek (Seal Press), and author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press).

Earlier, I was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a lecturer in American Studies at UC Berkeley. I was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, and have a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

Tracy Deonn Walker

Tracy Deonn Walker is a scholar-artist, young adult author, and geektivist. Her essay about growing up Black, female, and geeky is published in Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster’s OUR STORIES, OUR VOICES anthology and her debut YA contemporary fantasy series, DESCENDANTS, will be published 2020 and 2021, also by Simon Pulse. Tracy is on the Advisory Board of the upcoming 2019 documentary film, Looking for Leia, which explores the fandom of Star Wars fangirls. Tracy received her BA and MA in Communication and Performance Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill, where she wrote an award-winning thesis play about Superman, West African myths, and secret identities. After working as a theater director and a video game co-writer/producer, and returning to academia, Tracy was named a Graduate Fellow of Duke University’s Story Lab. Tracy can be found on Twitter as @tracydeonn. Find more info at tracydeonnwalker.com.